Well Vic3 will be the best selling game of all time so their money problems are effectively over.
I think that GOAT sales status, won’t occur until they add the FPS DLC, and the Fornite last country standing DLC, plus make the game sexier.
Honestly, after reading the ActivisionBlizzard thread the Paradox conflict, seems so dull.
I’m hoping this is sarcasm because all I thought while reading this is what a bunch of corporate speak. Concretely, what does any of this really mean?
No sarcasm. Have you read true corporate speak releases? This is refreshingly clear. Try anything from Satya Nadella at Microsoft for example.
Yes, here’s Satya and a minion describing a bad revenue forecast.
“The next decade of economic performance for every business will be defined by the speed of their digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We are innovating across our full modern tech stack to help our customers in every industry improve time to value, increase agility, and reduce costs.”
“Demand for our cloud offerings drove a strong start to the fiscal year with our commercial cloud revenue generating $15.2 billion, up 31% year over year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. “We continue to invest against the significant opportunity ahead of us to drive long-term growth.”
Compare to:
This report is a disappointment.[…]we have been too passive, something we are now rectifying.[…]We can and will perform far better. In the short term we have taken steps forward to become a smarter and sharper game developer and publisher.
So the CEO is as boring as their games?
One company makes less than $100 million a year. The other makes $160 billion a year.
I would expect the company making enough money to buy the other over a thousand times to have the sharper shareholder presentation.
I kinda feel bad for Paradox. They make niche strategy games, two of which miraculously gained massive followings. Now what do you do? You can keep printing EU and CK money, but how do you expand and grow based on this weird, very particular signal from your customers?
I worked at the second largest bank in the US, I know corporate speak. :)
These sentences stood out:
“We have also seen too low velocity in our internally developed projects.”
Too low “velocity”? WTH does that mean? They’re not making ammunition are they?
Then there’s this:
“We have chiseled a straight line forward for leveraging and developing Paradox’s strengths and have ground down many irregularities.”
That’s one of the silliest sentences I’ve read in a long while. Realistically, what does it even mean? What are their strengths and what are these “irregularities” he speaks of?
This whole paragraph is for the most part just vague statements:
“We can and will perform far better. In the short term we have taken steps forward to become a smarter and sharper game developer and publisher. Our pipeline is stronger after the quarter, we have freed up resources and begun to phase them into more promising projects and the work to refocus our energy to activities with greater revenue potential is in full swing. We put a lot of effort into ensuring that we henceforth have the right level of quality on all content we release. Going forward, we have a stronger framework for how we work with and set targets for the quality of games and expansions and have created a clearer ownership of game quality where decisions are made closer to game development.”
What are the concrete steps they’ve actually taken to do any of this? What have they done to insure better quality? What is this “framework” and how did they implement it? How do they set quality targets? It all sounds so “aspirational”. Given their problems, as an investor I’d like to know what concrete steps they are taking to fix their issues. I think they have clearly identified their problems, but their solutions sound rather vague. It just sounds like a lot of words for “we’ll do better”.
It may be MBA speak, but if they actually admit issues, they’re better than 99% of the industry. YMMV.
You don’t have to expand (in the sense of a big spurt), especially if it’s out of your depth, if you’re making enough money to keep going for many years. They can keep trying new things and publishing/acquiring small experiments that don’t break the bank and have some reason to be in the brand. If they find a new Triumph or Harebrained, why not.
Whether they have done it successfully, well, there’s a reason I don’t give investment advice, so, no comment. :P
You guys are insane. I don’t like to judge people. Well no, i like to do that, but anyway, I don’t know how one cannot consider this empty waste of words as the absolute opposite of what human language is meant to do.
In the regular software world, this would be a sound strategy. The gaming world is extremely risky though, and if you don’t find more baskets to put your eggs inside, you could easily find your company dying.
At a personal level I just hope they do right by Triumph (and that whomever makes up the core team there wants to stay together making games).
Oh we’re doing just fine. Just rolling along on our bikes :)
Very glad to hear that :)
Shams Jorjani, one of the most public faces of the company, is leaving Paradox.
Nuts, I guess The Business of Videogames podcast is well and truly finished now that he and Goldberg are gone.
I have a question. How do I get statistics on the popularity of various Paradox games? I’d like to understand both the sales of the base games and the average number of players?
Unless you wait for publisher numbers, and you trust them, on the likes of Steam Spy and Steam Stats.
This is what… the third or fourth very experienced Paradoxian leaving in the past few months? The great resignation seems to be taking its toll at PDX